Stitching Together a Better Consolidation and Reporting Solution

As a growing, diversified Alaskan company juggling businesses within various industries Bristol Bay Native Corporation’s financial landscape has never exactly been the easiest process to manage. Just about a year ago, we were dealing with:

80+ entities’ worth of financial data using over 30decentralized budget models and 6 days of manual effort in our monthly close.

Today, with the implementation of Tagetik’s automated consolidation and reporting solution, we are able to complete the monthly close in only 2 days.

Pretty impressive, huh? But, for those of you who may not believe that the numbers don’t lie, let me tell you more about it.

Before Tagetik, most of BBNC’s corporate-wide consolidation, budgeting, and reporting were done manually using Excel, resulting in a time-consuming input process, inconsistent mapping, and less than accurate reporting. As a result of using 5 decentralized, industry specialized systems, detailed reporting compilation and integration were a bit difficult to administer. On top of that, we struggled to identify and resolve discrepancies within our intercompany transactions.

Where we really thought Tagetik could help us out, however, was with the accuracy and speed of our non-controlling interest and equity method calculations.

Since we had never used an automated solution before, we decided to implement Tagetik in a three-phased approach consisting of:

corporate-wide consolidation and corporate level reporting (live for one year now),

corporate-wide budgeting (completed and used for FY 2017 budgeting process),

corporate-wide forecasting and specific business line reporting (to be completed within the next six months).

Over the 1500 hours of collaboration, we managed to discuss application design regarding the population of scenarios, companies, entities, accounts, and dimensions, develop source ETLs and centralized COAs, develop and test consolidation and intercompany rules, and develop and test output reports.

Throughout the implementation, we were able to stay within our budget and our timeline, thanks to the resources and guidance Tagetik’s consultants brought to our team. Not only were we pleased with their realistic, upfront implementation budget, we also were happy to find out that implementation had actually been completed under budget. Plus, we’ve found Tagetik’s software easy to use with a minimal learning curve, so that minimal assistance has been needed.

Benefits

Tagetik consolidation and reporting has reduced our manual processes greatly, resulting in significant time savings and increased reporting accuracy and usefulness to BBNC.

The biggest benefit has definitely been the mapping of our 5 decentralized ERP systems to a centralized chart of accounts. Now, monthly ETLs are run in a matter of minutes, providing consistent, accurate mappings and financial statement population. We’ve found that discrepancies within our intercompany transactions are much easier to identify and resolve. All of our new business acquisitions, investments, and wholly owned subsidiaries are easy to add and maintain, and reports are dynamically updated with additions and modifications.

Last but not least, non-controlling interest method and equity method calculations are automated and reported accurately on a monthly basis. Deriving all of our financial information from Tagetik’s one system of truth has provided us with the company-wide consistency we were seeking.

So far, BBNC has implemented corporate-wide budgeting models for payroll, direct, indirect and G&A expenses and created corporate level budget to actual reports at a company, business line, account, and cost-center level.

Moving forward, we hope to continue the development of our specific business line reporting using added dimensionality and project level detail, and look into Tagetik’s robust disclosure management systems. As Phase Three continues, we look forward to implementing and utilizing forecasting within Tagetik to help the corporate office and business lines better manage their operations.

What is your story? Are you still struggling with millions of spreadsheets?